Beatrice Faust is best remembered as the founder, early in 1972, of the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL). Women’s Liberation was already well under way. Betty Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique in 1962, arguing that many women found life as a full-time housewife and mother unfulfilling. With prevailing social assumptions denying them meaningful work, they were bored and frustrated, trapped by an ideal of domesticity that had become a prison.

Consciousness raising groups were meeting to understand how patriarchal assumptions had limited their members’ lives and self-understandings. Campaigns for equal pay, for childcare, for abortion law reform, were underway. In 1970 Germaine Greer, who had been at Melbourne University with Faust in the late 1950s, published The Female Eunuch, with its attack on the suburban consumerist nuclear family.

WEL began when Beatrice invited ten carefully-selected women to meet in the upstairs room of her Carlton terrace. The idea behind WEL was simple, as many brilliant ideas are. It was to survey political candidates for the 1972 federal election on their position on various issues of central concern to women and then to publicise the results.

American feminist activists Gloria Steinem and Patricia Carbine had surveyed the candidates for the forthcoming US presidential election and rated them according to their responses. After 23 years of Coalition government, momentum was building behind the Labor party and its dynamic leader, Gough Whitlam, and a Labor victory seemed within reach. So why not do the same here?

Compared........

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